


Blackbird

by rogueobservation



Series: Blackbird [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes - Freeform, Bucky barnes x reader - Freeform, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Hydra (Marvel), Marvel - Freeform, Marvel Universe, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Red Room (Marvel), Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Steve Rogers x Reader - Freeform, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, natasha romanov - Freeform, sam wilson - Freeform, steve rogers - Freeform, steve rogers x ofc - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-18 00:00:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19965376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rogueobservation/pseuds/rogueobservation
Summary: Before there was a Black Widow, there was a Blackbird; the most talented and famed spy of the Red Room and Hydra’s darling, Valerie. She was Steve Rogers’s greatest love and the Winter Soldier’s partner-in-crime. With the disappearance of Bucky Barnes and the fall of Hydra, Steve finally learns the truth and lies behind his oldest friend and his best girl.





	Blackbird

It was unbelievable how easy it was to break into Steve Rogers’ apartment. Simply, swiping the keys from an unlocked building manager’s office and knowing a seven-digit code that could easily be searched for via google. 

Valerie’s eyebrows rose in surprise when, upon the second try, the StarkTech security system chirped at her in success and an eight-bit smiley face popped up, giving her a thumbs up with a lousy “good job!” message attached in squiggly lettering. Bucky’s birthday? Are you fucking serious? 

She’d been prepared — no, was expectant — for a fight of some kind with the device. A retinal scan, fingerprint and voice confirmation of some kind, to enter Captain America’s — an Avenger’s — apartment. But nothing. 

It was a miracle that someone hadn’t broken into Steve’s apartment before now.

Valerie pocketed the stolen key, watching the smiley face disappear and the system’s screen turn black and glanced around the small entrance hall quickly. There was nothing. Junkmail on a table next to the door. She decided to begin with her mission. 

Like the blueprints she read, the apartment was comprised of four rooms; the main room with it’s organized sections, making up a living room, dining room, and kitchen with a small office-like area tucked into the back of the room against the wall of blue stained glass. The only bedroom was tucked off to the right of the room behind a dull, white door. 

Valerie blended in perfectly with the main room, hiding under the cover of the murky blue hue that the stained glass cast on the room. The lights from the nearby Brooklyn Bridge made the panes glow as the beginnings of rain pelted against the window, causing the bridge to turn into a watercolor painting and the distant skyline look like a hazy mirage, filling the room with white noise, drowning out the faint sound of Valerie’s stiletto boots clicking against the wood floor as she opened Steve’s bedroom door and made her way inside. 

It wasn’t anything special, decked out in all-white furniture and a matching bed. Moving boxes stuffed with neatly folded clothing sat unpacked around his dresser and full-length mirror. She briefly checked the dresser, seeing nothing but empty space inside the drawers before moving to Steve’s side of the bed. Inside his bedside table was a simple, bronze key the size of her palm. Valerie grabbed it, pocketing it like she had the other stolen key, and double-checked the room again out of habit before walking back into the main room.

There wasn’t anything valuable in the living room or kitchen, but the bare hook above the television set, which she guessed was for his shield and noted the strange way the room lacked any dust despite the fact that Steve was rarely ever home. 

Valerie ran a gloved hand across the backrest of the white leather L-shaped couch and sighed. Then, narrowing her eyes, she caught sight of the oak desk at the back of the room, hiding behind the dark shadows. An eagle was carved into the front of it. She walked over, pulling out the leather chair and sat, clicking on the lamp in the right corner. A single white card sat squarely on the surface of the desk:

A relic for a relic. 

— T. Stark. 

Howard’s son, Valerie thought. She knew Tony from the files she had found in Pierce’s house. He had been having an interesting few years, creating himself into the Iron Man, becoming a major consultant for SHIELD, and a founding member of the Avengers. Valerie wondered if he was anything like his old man. The thought of his late father made her tense up. Memories flooded her mind, but she repressed them as soon as they came, setting the card off to the side, turning her attention to the photos that sat around the desk. 

She recognized most of them: Steve meeting with General Eisenhower in 1944, a yellowed portrait of his mother, one of his father in his military uniform, and a black-and-white photo of him with his Howling Commandos and Peggy Carter at the Whip and Fiddle in early 1944. Her eyes drifted over all of them, a fond half-smile curving her lips as she looked at their smiling faces and the way they had their glasses raised in celebration, mouths forever sealed in a silent cheer. 

Her smile dimmed when she met two familiar faces. Bucky sported a wide grin, blue eyes squinting with happiness despite the looming fact that he was shipping out the next morning to travel across the European theater with Steve and the other Commandos. Bucky had his left around the back of Gabe Jones’ chair and the other around the woman that sat between him and Steve. 

Herself. 

If memory served her correctly, she had been wearing a peach-colored dress that night. Then-Valerie was trying to hide from the camera by pressing half of her face into the crook of Steve’s neck, laughing with the rest of them. 

Her eyes lingered for a long time between herself and Bucky until remembrance turned into a consuming melancholy that ate her up inside like a virus. 

She set the photo down and closed her eyes, stitching herself back together inside with experienced precision. This is why it was a bad decision to come here. Valerie cleared her throat and returned back to the task at hand, looking for what she came for. All the desk’s drawers were unlocked and empty except the single, middle drawer at the top. She took out the key from her pocket and carefully pressed it into the lock and turned. It clicked successfully. 

A twinge of horror flared up in her chest when she opened the drawer and immediately locked eyes on the familiar folders sitting inside. Identical faded brown, written in the same elegant Russian handwriting. The only difference was the titles: The Winter Soldier and The Blackbird. Two bloodstained legends. She couldn’t recall the last time she had seen the files. Something inside her said the nineties, but that didn’t seem right. It had to have been longer than that. They looked foreign to her. They were so out of place in this drawer, in this apartment — in this decade. 

The Blackbird file sat on top. Her file. Hesitantly, she reached for it, throwing it down on the desk like she was burnt. It was dated less than a decade before the Winter Soldier’s had been started. Don’t open it, don’t you dare fucking open it, Valerie. For once, she turned a blind eye to her gut, slipping off her gloves and hovering a hesitant hand over the worn cover. This wasn’t what she had come here for — not to open this pandora’s box of terror. 

But still, it called to her — tempting her. Slowly, she reached out and brushed her fingertips against the front before carefully unwinding the string that kept it secure. She whipped it back with a quick flick of her wrist, breath catching in her throat as her lips parted. For the second time that night, she met the dark eyes of herself. This time it was a picture taken in 1939, three years before she was handed over to Hydra. Just nineteen and a student of the Red Room, sporting the same trained, stoic expression she did today. It was paperclipped to an update report written four weeks earlier in Alexander Pierce’s refined penmanship, going on about her “experience” with him so far as her handler and his vision for her “bright future” ahead within Hydra. Creepy bastard.

Valerie’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion suddenly as she flipped the page, seeing another report, this time detailing her move in the late nineties to a safe house in Paris, France until further notice. She flipped a page again, seeing a grainy black-and-white photo from 1962 of her and the asset on a mission. Her, in stylish black dress and him in a matching all-black tux, walking hand-in-hand into a banquet hall. These aren’t in chronological order. Her stomach tightened at the realization that—

Clink.

Valerie switched off the lamp and grabbed for her gun from her thigh holster reflexively, glaring at the front door. The soft rattling of keys came from the other side again, this time louder as they clicked and the door opened, letting in a tall, dark mass. 

The person shuffled in, kicking the door shut behind them as they quickly shut off the incessant cry of the security system. They let out a deep sigh and dropped their keys into the dish on the entrance table. Heavy boots thumped against the floor as they were toed off. A bag was dropped in front of the bedroom door. He isn’t supposed to be home for another three days, tops. 

She risked enough by just coming here. The possibility of seeing Steve Rogers hadn’t been apart of the original plan. Valerie’s training switched on and she started going through the options for immediate removal. Hiding wasn’t an option and neither was managing to sneak past him to the front door with his heightened senses. She was stuck in a corner on this one. 

Valerie followed him with her eyes, watching him cross the room to the kitchen and sigh again as he opened up the fridge. The light inside illuminated his face and blond hair. As he reached for a water bottle, his back tensed up. Valerie prepared herself for the worst. This is going to be bad. He turned around and the door of the fridge shut softly behind him. Steve was looking right at her. She could feel his piercing stare. Darkness descended back on the room before a light switch was flicked, turning on the fixture above the sink. The gloom retreated back to their corners, revealing her. Val caught the red and blue of the shield in his hand. This is going to be very bad.

The mirky blue of his apartment turned her into a creature of the darkness, veiled by shadows, and camouflaged with the help of the black stealth uniform she wore. The lights from the bridge caught in the corner of her eyes, gleaming and twinkling from their reflection as rain drizzled down the panes of the large window.

His mouth was agape. “Val?” 

God, it was better than expected. She had dreamed of him saying her name — crossed seventy years of time just to hear one syllable of it strike her ear. Goosebumps crawled up her skin at the softness of it — so gentle.

He didn’t get a response. 

A myriad of emotions crossed his face: sadness, anger, relief, but mostly grief as he scrutinized her appearance, seeing if anything had changed in the past seventy years. Physically, she looked the same. She didn’t have her hair braided backward like the Hydra’s photo showed her sporting when she was in uniform. Instead, she wore it down in their natural waves, loose pieces framing her face. Steve glanced at the visible stitched Hydra logo on the shoulders of her outfit, then to his desk, seeing the opened file on the surface. Guilt racked his body at the sight. 

His sensitive hearing picked up on her steady breathing and the way her heart hammered away against her ribcage, mirroring his own. “How did you—?”

“Did you read them?” 

Now he was the one swooning, trying to bite back a wistful smile at the sound of her thick, Serbian accent. It hadn’t changed a bit either. It was as if she too had been frozen in time. Seventy years had no effect on her. Goosebumps spread across his body. 

“Yeah.” 

“Where did you get them?”

His eyebrows furrowed together as he carefully picked his next words. “Natasha Romanoff pulled some strings in Kiev,” he said. “Gave them to me after everything happened in D.C.” 

Natalia. Valerie felt the urge to laugh. She knew of the Red Room’s failed recreation of herself. She had spent the night once read over the woman’s KGB file, seeing the differences in their other than similar past. Natalia truly fascinated her. 

“Natasha couldn’t find a trace of you anywhere,” Steve continued. “We figured you were still with Hydra or with ran off with Bucky.”

There was a pang of sadness in her chest at his name, but her face remained void of emotion. “I left them.” She didn’t feel the need to specify who she was talking about.

Steve walked out of the kitchen, taking a stand beside the arm of the couch. She was almost eye level with him in her six-inch platform heels, absorbing his appearance with her oil-black eyes. He looked the same, too. A more updated hairstyle and clothing, but the same since the last she saw him. 

He didn’t want to take his eyes off her in. He had envisioned this moment every day since he had found out she was alive four weeks earlier. And honestly, he was still coming to grips with it all. Both Bucky and her had risen from the dead. 

Everything he imagined saying slipped away the moment he set his eyes on her. The unanswered questions of the past — about what she had done — still remained in his mind though. 

Steve gripped the handle of his shield and sized her up. “Clearly, you didn’t die in 1944.” She didn’t even blink to the statement. Not a hit of emotion sparked on her stoic face. He got no answer. “Did you lie about everything?” Again, he got nothing. His resigned tone changed to a commanding one as bitter anger rose to the surface. Steve scoffed in exasperation at her silence and shifted on his feet. “You owe me answers, Val.” 

“I was following orders.”

Steve’s lips curled into an incredulous smile. “To what exactly? Make me fall in love with you? Your file didn’t say anything about that being part of your mission.”

She stared at him with those unyielding eyes of her’s for a long time as a tired feeling grew over her. Why can’t this just be simple for once? She sighed. “I didn’t come to fight with you, Steven.” 

Steven. It hit him like a slap to the face and made everything that much worse. Steve frowned and ran his tongue over his bottom lip scoffing bitterly. “I waited for you at the train station for two hours when I came back to London. Bucky was dead and I was... grieving this immense loss. I had just watched my best friend fall from a train and die. I wanted comfort — I wanted you, Val.” Steve let his arm fall to his side. “But then Peggy showed up and the last bit of the light went out in my world. You just disappeared off the face of the earth, gone for three months by the time I returned. Colonel Phillips ordered them not to tell me about it until I was back at base.”

Valerie looked at the floor for a long moment. Her voice was quiet with an almost robotic response. “If you read my file, you know I wasn’t given a choice in that matter.” 

“That’s bullshit, Val,” he snapped. “There’s always a choice. Always! We were in a relationship. We loved each other. You were given the choice whether to tell me that you were a Hydra operative and you didn’t.” He looked off to the windows, taking a moment to calm down. Valerie lowered her gaze. He kept his eyes on the Avengers Tower in the distance and spoke. “We both know I would’ve moved Heaven and Earth just to have saved you from them.”

His words stung her somewhere deep. No one could have saved me. Val absentmindedly picked at the black gloves in her hand, gazing at his feet. “I didn’t come to fight with you.”

Steve sighed and ran a hand over his face, feeling the slight stubble that had grown while he was on his recent mission. “Why are you here, Val?” 

“I’m looking for information,” she said, meeting his eyes again. The shadows closed in around her as the rain beat harder against the window. “I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important.” 

Steve skeptically watched her for a moment before walking over, hooking his shield above the television on the hook. He crossed his arms and looked back at her, pressing his lips together into a tight line. She took that as a sign to continue. “Are you familiar with Kolesov Petrovich?”

“One of Hydra’s leaders, yeah.” His eyes narrowed, eyebrows knitting together, contemplating the blank look she gave him. She could see there was something there — just behind his eyes. More than the fact that Petrovich was Hydra. 

Valerie sighed and resigned to the fact that it was time she used the skill she was famous for. Retrieving information. “I’ve been trying to find him since Hydra went down. All my information is old and all my contacts either dead or deep underground, but I know Petrovich is set to take the head of the organization next. I was looking for information about his location — or at least a hint of where I can look.”

Steve’s head tilted in slight confusion. “You don’t know...?” 

Valerie feigned a look of ignorance. Bait. Set. Trap. 

Like everyone who had ever had the misfortune of coming in contact with the Blackbird, he fell for it and took her silence as a yes. “Petrovich was found tortured to death in an abandoned Hydra base in Russia four days ago, Val.”

That was news to her. Goddamnit. Anger hit her first towards whoever had taken Petrovich out before her. He had valuable intel that she needed. Her eyes flitted across the floor, thinking over the information. Steve noticed that the old habit had stuck with her.

Over the years, she had become a personal detector for bad intelligence. She believed this information was true, but her gut didn’t want to trust it. It was such a small blip in the bigger picture she was working to wipe out, but something about it wasn’t right. She looked back at Steve. 

“Where in Russia?”

“Just outside Penza.”

She was too good at her job to know that he was telling everything. There was something more to this story and she could feel it. It was evident in the tone of his voice. Hesitation. He didn’t want to tell her the rest. Steve shifted from one foot to the other, glancing at the windows every now and then to get away from her intense gaze on his face. 

“He’s not the first one,” Valerie said.

Natasha’s right. I am a shit liar. Steve slowly nodded. “He’s the fourth high-rank official we’ve found tortured to death and left in old Hydra bases in the past month. It started right after D.C.”

“Fourth?”

"Jakob Klemme, Emil Behm, and Stephen Hersh were all found dead, scattered across Germany at different bases. Petrovich’s the first we’ve found in Russia.” 

She took in the names, running them through all the information she had gathered over the decades. Klemme had been a top scientist within Hydra, working on the asset and her for a few years, while Hersh was his assistant. Hersh had taken over Klemme’s role after Klemme apparently deserted the organization in ‘88. She hadn’t seen nor heard of Hersh in several years now. And Behm had been just another average high-rank officer. Suddenly it hit her. The realization of what they were made her stomach drop. Shit.

She walked out from behind his desk, meeting his blue eyes in a quick glance. “I have to go.” 

An alarmed look came over his face. “What?” He was angry with her, but he didn’t want her to leave. They needed to talk. That information meant something to her, didn’t it?

Valerie shook her head, walking past him on the other side of his coffee table, tugging on her gloves quickly. “I’m sorry, Steven.”

“Wait,” Steve reached out to grab Valerie’s wrist. “What does that inf—“

It happened so quickly. Valerie stumbled backward, smashing into the television hard with her back, hand tightening around the trigger of her gun as she raised it at him. She glanced at his outstretched hand with her wide, horrified eyes. He hadn’t even touched her. Her breathing was shaky and uneven. Time seemed to stop and for a second her mask slipped, showing Steve the broken woman that hid underneath. It mirrored the expression Bucky had given him on the Helicarrier four weeks earlier. The decades of being with Hydra had changed something in her — fractured something deep inside both of them. And it was all noticeable in their eyes. 

Her voice betrayed her and broke. “Do not touch me.”

Her eyes met his and goosebumps went down his neck. He was startled by her reaction. Every nerve in his body called on him to take her in his arms, comfort her and never let go, but he knew he couldn’t. She didn’t want it. 

They watched for what seemed to be a lifetime as she gathered together her pieces again, tucking them back into place and slipping back on her stoic expression as if nothing had happened. Pushing herself off the tv, she walked towards the front door. “Goodbye, Steven.”

Steve didn’t move an inch, staring at the spot where she had stood until the door shut behind her and the echoing sound of her heels down the hallway faded. He looked at his reflection in the television screen and let out a loud sigh, burying his face in his hands and fell back on the couch. 

In the quiet of his apartment, he wondered if he’d ever see her again.


End file.
